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Border Crossings in the Japanese Anime YURI!!! on ICE Tien-Yi Chao National Taiwan University

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Border Crossings in the Japanese Anime YURI!!! on ICE Tien-Yi Chao National Taiwan University ISSN: 2519-1268 Issue 15 (Summer 2021), pp. 57-83 DOI: 10.6667/interface.15.2021.129 Border Crossings in the Japanese Anime YURI!!! on ICE tien-yi chao National Taiwan University Abstract YURI!!! on ICE (broadcast in Japan between October 5 and December 22, 2016), a Japanese anime featuring male figure skaters from across the world in the International Skating Union Grand Prix Final, has become very popular globally. It even attracted the world’s top figure skaters, such as Evgenia Medvedeva, Johnny Weir, and Stéphane Lambiel, who not only recommended the anime on their Twitter accounts but also were involved in various promotional events. The anime’s huge success lies in the production team’s intentional effort in crossing the boundaries of nationality, sexuality, and virtual reality. In this article, I analyse the ways in which the an- ime creates something in-between and hardly to be categorised—something that is neither real nor virtual, neither Japanese nor foreign, and neither BL nor gay. The anime serves as a tribute to both real-world competitive figure skating and an ideal Utopia in which all competitors and lovers, whether gay or straight, are treated equally with respect. It also demonstrates a brave and bold attempt to challenge established cultural and social norms by means of hybridsation and boundary crossing/blurring. Keywords: boys love (BL), Japanese anime, globalisation, Cool Japan, hybridity © Tien-Yi Chao This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. http://interface.org.tw/ and http://interface.ntu.edu.tw/ 57 Border Crossings in the Japanese Anime Yuri!! on ICE tien-yi chao National Taiwan University Aired on 5 October 2016 in Japan (IMDb, n.d.), YURI!!! on ICE is a Ja panese anime featuring male figure skaters from around the world competing for the International Skating Union (ISU) Grand Prix of Figure Skating Championship. The main story line is about Japanese skater Yuri Katsuki’s revival from a low career towards the Grand Prix Final, assisted by the coaching and affectionate friendship of Russian five-time World Champion Victor Nikiforov. An exceptional case in the Japanese industry of anime, comics, games, and novel (ACGN), the anime is an original production rather than an adaptation of any exist- ing works. It achieved great popularity in Japan during its broadcasting period, as its official Twitter site has attracted around 465,000 followers worldwide since its launch in 2016 (@yurionice_PR on twitter, n.d.). These fans come from both ACGN and non-ACGN audiences, includ- ing quite a few professional figure skaters such as Evgenia Medvedeva, a gold medallist in the ladies’ singles at the 2017 World Figure Skating Championships and holder of ‘new scoring world records on 13 occa- sions’ (International Skating Union, 2021; Olympic Channel, 2021). Medvedeva, who is both a skating champion and self-professed otaku, ‘has expressed her appreciation for the show—especially its more erotic scenes—on her Twitter feed’ (Stimson, 2016). As reported by Honey’s Anime (2016), Medvedeva promoted YURI!!! on ICE via her own Twit- ter account with extreme enthusiasm and even cosplayed Yuri Katsuki, one of the anime’s most popular protagonists. Since the last episode (ep. 12) released on 21 December 2016, there has been no sign of a second-season production of TV anime series (Troup, 2020). Yet fans may still have a semblance of hope from the scene of the ending song featuring the two main characters Victor and Yuri Kat- 58 CHAO suki performing pair skating and a snapshot of their life in St. Peters- burg, in addition to the message ‘See You Next Level’ at the very end (Mirar, 2016b). After a year’s wait, the anime’s production company MAPPA Co., LTD. (http://www.mappa.co.jp/) announced at an event in 2017 a project of producing the anime film entitled ICE ADOLES- CENCE (@yurionice_PR, 2018), scheduled for premier in 2020 (Troup, 2020). Due to the COVID-19 epidemic in 2020, the production was de- layed with no specific date of release (YURI!!! on ICE the Movie: ICE ADOLESCENCE, n.d.). Later a short teaser PV anime was uploaded to YouTube on 26 November 2020, which ‘was exclusively released at last year [2019]’s theatrical screening of Yuri!!! on ICE [sic] TV se- ries’ (avex pictures, 2020), showing the 17-year-old Victor appearing to skate for Winter Olympics (Troup, 2020; Llewellyn, 2020). The video’s popularity with 2,579,038 views and 290,000 likes (avex pictures, 2020) demonstrate both the anime fans’ support of the forthcoming anime film and the likelihood of the film’s ‘[giving] new life to the fandom’ (Troup, 2020). In addition to its huge popularity and commercial success, the anime has won numerous awards. According to the report of Anime News Network (Loveridge, 2017), it even won first place in online voting for the 2017 Tokyo Anime Awards’ Anime of the Year, with 41,439 votes. It was also a winner of the 2017 Crunchyroll Anime Awards: Best Cou- ple for Yuri & Victor; Best Opening for ‘History Maker’; Best End- ing; Anime of the Year; Best Boy for Yuri Katsuki; Best Anime; and Most Heartwarming Scene for the kiss from Ep.7. In the Tokyo Anime Award 2018 it won Fan Prize in the Television Category as shown in IMDb (2021). Clearly it is a huge achiever in the industry, as Ian Wolf comments, ‘Yuri!!! On ICE [sic] is on course to make a clean sweep and win all seven of the categories it was nominated in’ (Wolf, 2017a). Most importantly, the anime was the sole winner of Crunchyroll’s first-ever ‘Anime of the Year Award’ (Fryer, 2017), despite complaints from a proportion of Crunchyroll users about some YURI!!! on ICE fans’ con- troversial voting behaviour (Wolf, 2017b). 59 interface 1 Literature Review, Theoretical Framework, and Methodology Until the date of submitting this paper (April 21, 2021), there have been around ten English publications on YURI!!! on ICE. A majority of them focused on fandom (McInroy and Craig, 2018; Zhang, 2018; Morimoto, 2019; Santos, 2019) and queerness (Laws, 2017; Mehta, 2021). Taking a slightly different approach, Karl Ian U. Cheng Chua invokes scholarly attention to the engagement of South-East Asian fans as a counterargu- ment against the globalist perspective based on Koichi Iwabuchi’s trans- national theory of ‘culturally odorless’ (Cheng Chua, 2018, p.29, p.34). Another set of studies examine the cross-cultural elements (esp. gender and sexuality) of the anime, such as Tien-yi Chao’s study of imagined Russian identity in the anime (2019). Given its global popularity, YURI!!! on ICE should be viewed as a mile- stone in Japanese anime history and thus worthy of scholarly attention. Inspired by the above studies, this paper aims to extend Iwabuchi’s observation of Japan’s transnational soft power based upon culturally odorless products (2004, 2015) to the case study of YURI!!! on ICE. I contend that the anime is important in its innovative, ‘border-crossing’ nature that distinguishes it from other conventional or mainstream Japanese anime. The anime is likely to become a successful model of the effective ‘pop-culture diplomacy and the Cool Japan policy’, which, according to Iwabuchi’s interpretation, involves ‘selling more Japanese cultural products and enhancing certain national images’ (2015, p.425). In addition, the analysis in the main body seeks to explore and illus- trate the phenomenon of cultural hybridity by looking at the anime’s charaterisation, settings, and plot. Based upon the notions of cultural hybridity and Cool Japan, this paper will discuss the ways in which YURI!!! on ICE crosses three borders of facts vs fiction, nationality, and sexuality. The fundamental research methodology applied for this study was textual and intertextual analysis of various materials ranging from scenes and contents of the anime, news reports, commentary articles, and interviews, to social media (facebook/Reddit/Tumblr/Twitter posts and comments), with a focus on English-language comments and fan- 60 CHAO dom. As I will demonstrate in later pages, such a wide choice of data helps in developing a case study of YURI!!! on ICE to decode the intri- cate border-crossing elements created by the anime and its production team, with a focus on their hybrid nature. Following this introduction, the findings of this study will be discussed in three sections. In the section ‘Border crossing 1’, I will address the anime’s success in connecting the imaginative world of figure skating with real-life figure skaters in Japan and abroad. Under ‘Border crossing 2’, I will focus on transcultural communication and cultural hybridisa- tion facilitated by YURI!!! on ICE’s characterisation, plot, and settings. Under ‘Border crossing 3’, I will elaborate on the blurring gender/sex boundaries presented by the anime, especially those among homosoci- ality, homosexuality, and boys love (BL)/bromances. In so doing, the study aims to contribute to the latest scholarship on Japanese anime and cultural studies by stimulating further exchange and communication on the anime’s impact in terms of globalisation and glocalisation. 2 Border crossing 1: imaginary world vs. real world Non-anime fans tend to have two common misconceptions about anime: anime is only for otaku or fans, and anime is unrealistic and based on wild imagination and alternative universes, similar to all products in otaku culture (e.g. manga, games, light novels). Yet, as I will demon- strate in this section, YURI!!! on ICE challenges these two misconcep- tions by crossing and blurring the boundary in three aspects: character- isation, glocalization, and connection between the imaginary world in the anime and the real world of figure skating.
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